Six Illinois scientists rank among world’s most influential

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Six researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have been named to the 2024 Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researchers list. The list recognizes researchers and social scientists who have demonstrated exceptional influence, as reflected through their publication of multiple papers frequently cited by their peers during the last decade.

The highly cited Illinois researchers this year are: natural resources and environmental sciences professor Kaiyu Guan, materials science and engineering professor Axel Hoffmann, climate, meteorology and atmospheric sciences professor Atul Jain, crop sciences and plant biology professor Stephen Long, and psychology professor Brent Roberts. Psychology professor emeritus Ed Diener, who is deceased, is also on this year’s list.

Guan works to ensure sustainable food production and develop solutions to environmental challenges in agriculture, focusing on agroecosystem modeling, remote sensing, environmental forecasting and agricultural adaptation to climate change. He uses satellite data, computational models, fieldwork, supercomputing and machine-learning approaches to address how climate and human practices affect crop productivity, water resource availability and ecosystem functioning. He is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and is the chief scientist of the NASA Acres Consortium. At the U. of I., Guan is the founding director of the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center, a professor of computing and data science and a Blue Waters professor at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Hoffmann is a Founder Professor in Materials Science and Engineering and a member of the Materials Research Laboratory. His research focuses on topics related to magnetism, such as spin transport, magnetization dynamics and biomedical applications. His work on spin Hall effects has contributed to developing spintronics, electronic devices that harness electron spin for faster and more efficient computing. Hoffmann is a Fellow of the American Vacuum Society, the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. At Illinois, Hoffmann also is a professor of electrical and computer engineering and physics and is affiliated with the Holonyak Micro and Nanotechnology Lab.

Jain’s research expertise is in building and applying the climate modeling systems necessary to understand and quantitatively predict the bidirectional interactions of human activity with the global climate system. He contributes to major assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Geophysical Union, and recieved the Distinguished Alumni Award from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. He is included on the Reuters list of top climate scientists. He also is affiliated with the U. of I. Center for Global Studies and the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.

Long is the Stanley O. Ikenberry Chair of Crop Sciences and Plant Biology. He uses computational and bioengineering approaches to improve photosynthetic efficiency in crop plants and works to address the effects of climate change on crop physiology and yields. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2013 and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019. He founded Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency, a multinational project to increase crop production. He also is the founding and chief editor of the journal Global Change Biology, a highly cited journal on how global change is altering the biosphere. He is an affiliate of the Carl R. Woese Insitute for Genomic Biology, NCSA and the Center for Advanced Study at the U. of I. 

Roberts specializes in the field of personality psychology and studies continuity and change in personality throughout adulthood, with an emphasis on understanding the factors that influence change. His recent research focuses on assessing and building social, emotional and behavioral skills. Roberts is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and the Association of Psychological Science. At Illinois, he holds the Gutsgell Endowed Professorship, is a professor of biomedical and translational sciences in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, an affiliate of the Center for Social and Behavioral Science and IGB, and serves as a senior science advisor to the Office of the Provost. 

Diener, who died in 2021, was a social psychologist and a leader in the field of positive psychology, which focuses on the factors promoting happiness and well-being. In the mid-1980s, he and colleagues developed the Satisfaction with Life Scale, and in 2009 the Flourishing Scale, both designed to gauge happiness — which he called “subjective well-being” — in a methodical, repeatable manner. He was a co-author of hundreds of articles on the subject of well-being. He won the American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions in 2012. In an obituary of Diener, The New York Times called him “a playful social psychologist” who conducted

“pioneering research into what defined contentment.”